Willow stared after him a moment. Then a hand clamped on her shoulder. She turned to see Giles offering her a sword. He pointed to the dead bucks, and the faerie and hounds that battled amongst themselves for the spoils.
“Their feeding frenzy won’t last forever,” Giles said. “They’re beginning to notice . . .”
“Tell me about it,” Willow said, thinking of the hound.
Without waiting for Giles, she ran toward the mound of faerie, toward the snarling hounds. Summoning all the skill she had acquired since she had asked Giles and Buffy for some self-defense tips, she swung the sword, cleaving a hound into a blast of black mist and twin dead husks. Several faerie turned to see what had happened. Two of them were sliced in half by her next slash. Some of them began to run.
Then Giles was with her, and soon a small cloud of black mist had begun to eddy on the breeze around them. The cloud was growing.
Xander leaped from his perch in the trees. The momentum of his fall took a huge bald Huntsman right off his horse. The two landed hard in the undergrowth and Xander didn’t give the dark-skinned elfin man time to even move. He started pounding the Huntsman’s face with his fists. The rider’s weapon, a straight black iron mace—no ball and chain but one solid piece—lay on the ground two feet away.
When the Huntsman threw him off, Xander landed right next to the mace. He grabbed it with both hands as he rolled to his knees. The Huntsman had drawn a dagger and was diving for him. Xander swung his arms, the mace crashed into the Huntsman’s knee from one side and pulped the bone into powder. The hideous elf went down. Xander smashed the hand that held the dagger.
Xander’s heart beat a mad, terrified rhythm, but he didn’t stop. He raised the mace above his head and brought it down onto the face of the Huntsman. The elf’s skull imploded with a burst of oily black mist that was quickly sucked away on a powerful wind which had begun to kick up.
“No, no, no, don’t do that,” Cordelia said.
Cordelia spun Treasure around with one strong tug. The other girl was still reaching for her sword. She’d hoped to reason with the girl, but it was too late for that. Cordelia hit Treasure in the head with a large rock she’d picked up from the path, closing her eyes as if the pain were her own.
Treasure collapsed in a heap, blood flowing down over her face. She didn’t get up again.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Cordelia whispered to herself.
“I can’t kill the king,” Buffy said angrily, “but until he orders me to stop, the rest of the Hunt is open season.”
Roland said nothing, but Buffy didn’t wait for a reply. She rode down hard on one of the elfin Huntsmen who had dismounted. Her sword whickered through the air, cleanly severing the rider’s head with the sound of a hatchet striking wood. The head tumbled through the air, rolling into the trees as the headless corpse fell under the hooves of Buffy’s horse.
A second rider was just ahead, his eyes burning with fire, ears pointed at the tip. His features were thin and cadaverously bony. There was nothing human in him, in any of the elves who still lived. Maybe six, at a glance.
Any trace of fear was gone from her. Now, all she cared about was saving her friends, and stopping these monsters who had preyed so long on the hopeless and helpless and unsuspecting people, the ones who had nowhere to turn. And the babies. She thought about the babies, and she screamed, her lungs seared by a cry of such savagery it frightened her.
Buffy put one foot on the back of her horse and catapulted herself at the Huntsman. She was behind him, and he tried to move his horse around to defend against her attack. Not fast enough. Buffy held her sword in both hands, point down, and landed behind him on his mount, driving her sword down through the Huntsman’s back hard enough for the tip to stab the horse through its back.
The stallion screamed in pain and bucked, throwing Buffy to the ground with the corpse. She tried to withdraw her sword, but it was lodged inside the dead elf warrior. She pulled as hard as she was able, but could not free the blade.
Giles saw the Erl King lift Angel off the ground, his sword held high. He was roaring unintelligibly, too infuriated to even pretend at humanity any longer. Instead of slashing at Angel, the King slammed him against the tree again. Then he lowered his head, his horns sharp and gore encrusted. As Giles watched in astonishment and horror, the Erl King reared back and rushed at Angel like a savage bull.
Buffy screamed.
The Erl King’s horns gored Angel’s abdomen.
Angel’s eyes snapped open and he cried out in agony. Blood spurted from the wounds, soaking Angel’s clothes, running down the tree bark, splashing the Erl King’s face.
Oz leaped onto the Erl King’s back.
Giles rushed forward and ran his sword through the Erl King’s side, buried it to the hilt and then pulled up as hard as he could, trying to eviscerate the creature but failing as the blade snagged on bone.
The Erl King backhanded him with one taloned hand. Giles’s glasses flew off, and he stumbled backward and dropped to the path, barely conscious. Several dark faerie cackled in chaotic madness, and leaped on him.
Then Xander and Willow were there, tearing them off, stomping them into the ground, mashing the creatures beneath their feet.
Oz was slashing the Erl King, but then even he was thrown aside. Hern the Hunter rounded on them all. He snorted like a bull, fire rushing from his eyes and nostrils in long streams. Blood dripped from his horns. Where Angel had torn his throat open, flames licked at the wound, blackening the edges.
Then the Erl King’s eyes locked on Buffy. “You!” he roared through his destroyed throat, more than ever sounding like an animal. “This is all because of you!”
He stalked toward Buffy. Oz went after him again and was thrown aside. Angel staggered to his feet, but one of the few remaining Hunters slammed into him from behind and they tussled on the hard-packed dirt of the path.
Buffy turned to face the Erl King. She had lost her sword, but now she brandished the cruelest of weapons, the morningstar mace. Its spiked ball swung menacingly on the iron chain.
“Put it down,” the king snarled.
Her oath controlling her movements, Buffy put the weapon down.
“On your knees!”
Buffy fell to her knees on the path.
The Erl King raised his sword.
Willow and Cordelia brushed away the few dark faerie that remained and ran for Buffy, holding weapons they had no hope of using effectively.
The sword began to fall.
And clanged and sparked as the edge of a battleaxe turned it away.
The Erl King turned, enraged, ready to gut whomever had dared interfere. He found himself blazing eyes to blazing eyes with his only son, Roland, prince of the Hunt. Roland held his double-edge axe at the ready.
“I will not let you kill her, Father,” Roland said, his voice low and dangerous. “You’ll have to kill me first, and I don’t believe you would take my life.”
Hern the Hunter stared at his son for several moments before lowering his sword. “You’re right, Roland. I cannot kill my own son.”
Roland seemed to relax a moment. Then his father’s burning throat pulsed with bursts of fire as the Erl King began to laugh.
“Slayer,” the Erl King said, turning to Buffy. “Kill Roland.”
Against her will, Buffy reached for the morningstar.
Chapter 17
IN THE CLEARING, RIDERLESS HORSES TRAMPLED THE dessicated remains of most of the Wild Hunt. A small handful of dark faerie still survived, but they were running about in a blind panic, unable to gather together for any kind of joint action. War cries and screams filled the air, and horses stamped their hooves.
It was not hot, but sweat ran down Buffy’s forehead. She was hunched over, the iron handle of the morningstar held tightly in both hands. Her hair had fallen over her face, and she blew it away from her eyes. She gritted her teeth so hard that her jaw hurt. With every fiber of her being, she tried to drop the mornings
tar, to throw it aside. She thought about using it to strike herself, thinking that perhaps pain would break the magical hold of the oath she had taken.
She could not even do that.
“Kill him, Slayer!” the Erl King roared.
Roland attacked his father again, axe blade scraping sword edge before Roland spun away. He turned to attack again, and the Erl King had rushed at him, head bowed, horns deadly sharp. But the Erl King was huge and heavy, and Roland small and lithe. He easily outmanuevered his father, and hacked a deep wound in the King’s side as he passed by.
“Buffy, I command your loyalty,” Hern the Hunter declared. “Slay my son!”
Buffy stood a bit straighter. With a cry of anguish, she ran at Roland, her eyes apologizing even as she whipped the morningstar around on its chain, bringing the spiked ball down toward him. But Roland was a warrior like few others, trained by the Lord of the Hunt himself. He turned his axe blade and took the brunt of the spiked ball’s impact broadside. Instead of the chain wrapping around the axe, the blow was harmlessly turned away.
The prince of the Hunt parried her attack and managed to move aside before his father could take advantage of the distraction.
“That’s right, Slayer, kill him!” the Erl King said smugly. “Crush the ungrateful whelp’s head for me.”
Giles was a deft swordsman in his own right. The elfin Huntsman who attacked him now had the advantage of centuries of practice, however. There was no way Giles could beat him. He could only hope to hold out a while longer and hope for assistance.
Which came, quite suddenly, in the form of a broad curved sword, like a scimitar, which separated the Huntsman’s head from his shoulder at the neck. The elf warrior went down, and Giles ran him through. When he looked up, he expected Angel, or perhaps Oz.
It was Cordelia.
“Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Xander said grimly.
“Yes,” Giles agreed. “Quite.”
Cordelia cried out, and Giles turned to see Buffy aiding the Erl King in his battle against Roland. She was struggling against the oath she had taken, he could see that. But it was only a matter of time before the young prince succumbed to the onslaught.
Giles ran toward them.
“Buffy!” Giles shouted.
Even as she brought the handle of the morningstar up to deflect Roland’s blade, almost like bunting in baseball, she turned in response to Giles’s voice. Roland’s axe deflected off of her own weapon and sliced neatly through her shoulder. A superficial wound, but the pain helped her focus her thoughts.
“You’ve got to fight it!” the Watcher told her. “You’re the Slayer. You aren’t like other humans. You can fight.”
Buffy frowned. Giles himself had as much as said the oath was unbreakable. Yet now he was saying it might be otherwise. Buffy was confused, but Giles was certainly right about one thing. She wasn’t like other humans. She was the Slayer.
“We performed a ritual!” Giles added. “It’s weakened them, you see?”
“Kill him now!” the Erl King roared. With Buffy distracted, Roland had turned his attention back to his father, and now the prince of the Hunt’s axe dealt the Erl King a grievous wound to the left arm. Black mist escaped and the arm hung limply at the Erl King’s side.
Buffy froze. She felt, more than anything, as though she was going to throw up. It was that moment of total body rictus just before she would start to puke her guts up. She began to hyperventilate, her breath coming too fast. She closed her eyes, heedless of the danger around her. She could hear blades clanging as her friends continued to war with the remaining Huntsmen.
Her muscles ached, pulled, seemed to tear as she fought them.
Slowly, she fought to slow her breathing. Then, suddenly, she opened her eyes.
Raised the morningstar.
The Erl King smiled broadly.
The spiked ball whipped through the air and crushed the left side of his face, flames shooting out past the iron.
“I’m the Slayer,” she whispered, her throat tight. “I’m not like other girls.”
With a roar of agony, the Erl King dropped his sword. He backhanded Buffy, sending her tumbling into the underbrush at the edge of the path. She climbed painfully to her knees, but Roland had already taken her place.
“Surrender, Father, or you will die here, so far from home. Not even your spirit will return to the Lodge,” Roland said, his voice breaking with sorrow for a creature who had been nothing but cold and heartless to him.
The Erl King roared, all trace of sentience or humanity gone from him now. The fire in his eyes blazed high enough to singe his helmet, and trailed behind him as he bent his head and rushed at his son, horns aimed for Roland’s gut.
Roland was exhausted and stunned by his father’s ferocity. He brought his battleaxe up, but not in time. The Erl King’s horns punched through his belly and lifted him up, and still, Hern the Hunter ran forward. Roland cried out in pain as he was lifted off his feet by the ragged wounds in his abdomen, and then the Erl King drove Roland into a wide tree, the horns driving deeper, goring him.
If Roland had been even remotely human, he would have been dead then.
Instead, he raised his axe over his father’s head, grasped the handle in both hands, and brought it down with tremendous force, cleaving his father’s skull in two. There was an ear-splitting roar, though from which of them Buffy could not tell, and then Roland’s axe seemed to explode with flames. Fire jetted from the Erl King’s skull as he died.
Fire that raced up Roland’s arms to his face.
Roland roared and the fire reached inside him as if seeking shelter.
The prince of the Hunt threw his arms wide and his eyes exploded in a jet of viscous black mist.
Then the empty sockets began to burn.
“Roland, die in peace,” Buffy whispered.
She closed her eyes and let a single, harsh sob escape her.
Then the wind whipped her hair. She felt the electrical charge of energy that had surged through her during her ride with the Hunt. Wailing stung her ears.
She opened her eyes.
Astride a jet-black horse sat the Erl King in all his majesty.
“Oh, God,” Buffy groaned. She had failed miserably.
Roland was dead, but his father had somehow survived.
“Hern the Hunter is dead,” the king said, his voice a guttural growl. His silhouette shimmered with black light that pulled in the colors of the forest and made the world around him gray and shadowed.
“Long life to the Erl King,” chorused the four surviving riders of the Wild Hunt as they raised their weapons in gore-covered fists.
Three of them were elfin. The fourth was Connie DeMarco, known forever now as Treasure.
Buffy stared. It was Roland.
She tried to speak as four pointed horns sprouted from Roland’s head and grew to a breadth unmatched by his father’s. His skin was dark, and as she watched, hair grew on it. He became shaggy. Terrifying to look at.
He looked exactly like his father.
The flame that had coursed from father to son had been the passing of life, the passing of command from a king to his heir, the passing of all the power of the primeval forest, the first beasts to roam the land, from the Erl King to Roland, son of Hern the Hunter and Lucy Hanover, Chosen One.
He looked down at her and smiled. Dismounted. The girl, Connie, took the reins of his horse.
“How?” Buffy rasped.
“What was my body before, but a vessel?” he asked. “What is it now, but a shadow? The night cloaks me. She will always cover me.”
“Roland,” she whispered. “I—”
In his taloned hands he took her head, then bent— much taller than she now—and kissed her on the forehead.
“You swore an oath to obey the commands of the Erl King. I am king now, Buffy. Be free, Slayer, and be well,” he said. “I fear that when next we meet, it will not be as friends.”
B
uffy frowned. “You could change things,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“It does,” Roland said simply, taking her hand, and she heard the growl in his wide chest, like the sound of animals lurking in shadows. “Oh, things will change. A little at a time. As much as I can manage. But the Wild Hunt will always ride, and the hopeless and foolish will always join us whether they wish it or not. We are part of the fabric of the night, Buffy. Neither the Lord of the Hunt nor the Slayer is powerful enough to alter that.”
He kissed the back of her hand in a courtly gesture.
“I would ask you again to be my queen,” he whispered, in a voice meant for her ears only, “but I already know your answer.”
Buffy slowly pulled her hand away.
“Good luck, Roland,” she said.
“And to you,” he replied.
Then he turned and took Treasure’s hand. He helped her mount her horse, and Buffy saw the way he looked at her. She would be Queen of the Hunt, of course. Giles tried to talk to her; so did Cordelia, in her way. But Treasure could not be convinced that there was any future for her in the world she had grown up in. Besides, she had already begun to die, to be resurrected into the life of the Hunt.
Even now, as Buffy looked at her, she thought that Treasure’s eyes glowed just the tiniest bit.
The barrier that had held the Wild Hunt within the forest had slowly dissipated not long before Roland led the remaining Huntsmen back to the clearing and into the dark mist that still hung there. It would be gone by morning.
When they emerged from the forest, Oz returned completely to normal. It was cold, and he was shirtless, so Giles let Oz wear his tweed sportcoat. It had already been damaged beyond repair, so he saw no harm in it.
“Oh, man, I totally forgot,” Oz groaned as they walked up the embankment toward Route 17. “They trashed my van.”
“It’ll be okay,” Willow said confidently. “It might take a while, but I know you can fix it.”
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